From Metro to mall: new portal connecting 7th/Metro and The Bloc now open

Metro’s first direct subway-to-shopping connection is now open in DTLA, marking its growth as a center of activity. In ye olden days of yesteryear, traveling between 7th/Metro Center and The Bloc Downtown — home to Macy’s,District kitchen + bar and more — required you to exit the station and cross busy 7th Street. Now, after getting off the train, exit toward Hope Street and use the pedestrian passageway to walk directly into a hub of food, shopping and more.

Photos: Joe Lemon/Metro

These sorts of connections are important not just for safety and convenience — although those reasons are definitely up there — but because they create the type of interconnected space that makes for an appealing destination for residents, workers and visitors alike. When everything’s easy to reach, you’re more likely to want to go there again.

7th/Metro Center is served by four rail lines: the Blue, Expo, Red and Purple Line. Come 2021, it will also be served by the Regional Connector, which will link the Blue and Expo Line to the Gold Line. The Bloc is a mixed-use destination that includes a Macy’s, a Sheraton Hotel, an office tower and an open marketplace that features boutiques, retailers and restaurants.

Hmm. One restaurant open, that doesn’t appear to serve anything that particularly appeals to me as a pre-concert dinner, and no directory maps of the place on the web site yet. Doesn’t exactly help matters that there’s a Starwood hotel there: Starwood lost my business forever, the day they inflicted the “W” hotel chain upon an unsuspecting world (I stayed at one once, in Chicago, and promptly informed my travel agent that I’d rather she’d booked me into the “Y”).

For now, I think I’ll stick with splitting my Disney Hall pre-concert dinners between 10e and the Pantry. (Clifton’s lost my business for good, the second time I walked all the way over there only to find them closed for a special event that they hadn’t bothered to post on their web site. Such a shame that the new owners put in so much time, money, and effort, and yet they left out Clifford Clinton’s soul.)

You try staying positive after walking a third of a mile to a closed restaurant, and ending up with no time left for a “Plan B” that would still get you to Disney Hall by curtain time.

The second time, that was the case. And while the chow hall in the building was actually serving something I found appetizing, it sold out of its last serving in the time it took me to use the Men’s Room across the street-level lobby.

This is the second pedestrian passageway that has been built. The first was the passageway at the North Hollywood station connecting to the Orange Line. Or maybe the third? I think the Universal Station has some type of passageway. Are there any other stations that a pedestrian passageway would be helpful? In the future will Metro incorporate a pedestrian passageway into the design of the station?

The point really isn’t a passageway connecting to a shopping center but to keep people off of busy streets! North Hollywood station build a passageway to connect to the Orange Line, thus keeping people off Lankershim! I believe the samething happened for Universal station, but I rarely go there, so not 100% sure.

In the future Metro should incorporate these passageways, either to a shopping center or connect to other rail stations.

If I’m traveling from Santa Monica to North Hollywood, can I stop at The Bloc during my 2-hour window and grab a bite to eat and then return to the station as a transfer, or does it count as a new ride?

Yeah, that happened recently when I passed the turnstiles just to add money to my TAP card. Was pretty annoyed by that. I really think that you should allow someone to exit and re-enter the station during the 2 hours if you’re not going to have vending/bathrooms inside the station.